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Re: Bitcoin

I'll just poast the farking article. it's from the spring 2011 edition of 2600 magazine.

[spoiler:14hbfsdc]

How to Accept
Payments Anonymously
A Digital Currency Guide

by Max Vendorhttps://privacybox.delmaxvendor.msg
You wish to sell something. You don&#39;t want
anybody to know who you are. Maybe you don&#39;t
want to be at risk to rampant civil litigation or
exposed to fraudulent buyers, or perhaps your
competition is completely evil and will come after
you for infringing upon their monopoly. Or you
could live in a country blacklisted by the western
corporate structures of modem financial payment
systems such as PayPal, Visa/MC, Moneybookers,
etc. Or you are Julian Assange and don&#39;t want your
donations stolen.
In what the media likes to refer to as the "post
9/11 world," we are all at the mercy of the U.S.
government, who for the past decade or so has
been pursuing a policy to extend the global reach
oftheir lobbyists&#39; claws to pretty much everywhere
on earth. Basically every country must give up
personal data and conform to identification regula-
tions for transactions under the guise of security
or protecting copyrights. Noncompliance means
sanctions, and a variety ofother strong arm tactics,
so eventually almost all of the world&#39;s govern-
ments have caved to these reporting requirements.
It&#39;s not like all our countries aren&#39;t filled with the
same corporations buying off the same technocrats
we call leaders anyways. This was bound to happen
eventually with the growing cancer ofcorporatism.
Remember personal Swiss numbered accounts?

Long gone. Cayman Islands offshore protection?
Same. They&#39;ve even gotten all those micro-coun-
tries in Europe like Jersey, whose only income was
probably offering a tax haven. Even they caved.
Transfer systems such as PayPal in some situations
can have your linked bank accounts frozen, and
they give away your info to practically anybody
who faxes them a legal letterhead. If you can cut
and paste some legal website&#39;s logo and use an
online fax service, you can probably get anybody&#39;s
info, or have their account held, or demand further
verification. The harassment potentials have no
bounds. There are online lawyers everywhere now
who do this for only $50. The MPAA probably
has a button they push that freezes accounts upon
request.
Instead of buying fake ID and scans from
vendors on shady carding forums and exposing
yourself to Secret Service or Interpol honeypot
traps, there are in fact methods to conceal your
identity and still sell something without undesir-
able people knowing who you are, people like
lawyers, secret police, the media, organized reli-
gion with lawyers, corporations, or rival porn
studios run by the mob. Whatever the reasons, it
is now very easy for anybody in the world to buy
digital currency and pay you with it. The days of
complicated and expensive bank wire transfers
to Latin America just to fund an account with 12
percent fees taken by middlemen along the way are
gone. Rejoice! Let&#39;s punt some junk on the Internet
and be anonymous.
Before I begin, every time this topic is brought
up, somebody immediately reacts loudly that anon-
ymous currency must only be used for heinous
criminal activity like terrorism, and therefore
should be controlled. Yet they probably use cash
every day which is (omg) anonymous - though not
for long. In 20 years, we&#39;ll most likely be forced
to have cash credits traded on cards that log every
transaction. Tell them criminal gangs use stolen
cards, logins, and professional laundering services
like ePharma merchant account resellers to cash
out with layers of shell companies and casinos.
Terrorists use a cash honor-based system that has
been around since the eighth century called Hawala
(which is actually a pretty awesome idea when you
read up on it). They also get their money by skim-
ming cash from all that so-called rebuilding money
floating around Afghanistan and Iraq. Besides, you
don&#39;t even need money to be a terrorist. Remember
the Unabomber? He lived in a wooden shack
without running water or electricity. The 9/11 guys
didn&#39;t need a bunch of money to buy box cutters
and one way tickets. Child porn traders and other
morally repugnant vendors at the shallow end of
the human gene pool do not actually sell anything.
Sure, there may be sites appearing to sell this stuff
saying you can buy their illegal porn, but it&#39;s either
a trap, or the RBN who is going to hold your info
ransom after payment to extort more money out of
you. Do not believe the myth that there is some sort
ofglobal child porn profitable empire in 2011. This
is created by the media and fictional cop drama
television, and perpetuated by our governments so
they can get an excuse to monitor financial trans-
actions. When that excuse doesn&#39;t work they&#39;ll
find some other reason, which they already have
- called intellectual property rights.
Your road to digital e-currency begins at the
talkgold. com and bi tcoin. org forums
which list legitimate exchangers. Here&#39;s a break-
down of some of what&#39;s currently available and
easy to use:
LiqPAY (Liquid Payments Inc.), based out
of the Ukraine. With a phone and a credit card,
anybody can send you up to $200 per transaction
and the payment can&#39;t be charged back. Use an

SMS forwarding gateway or a burner phone (see
The Prophet&#39;s previous 2600 article on Tracphones)
to receive the payments. Exchange the LiqPAYinto
another digital currency with the many exchangers
in Russia, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Ukraine.
Cash out - nobody knows who you are if you&#39;ve
used a Virtual Visa or anonymous card for verifi-
cation (they block the card with a small transac-
tion, then ask you to enter it as confirmation). Be
warned: sometimes LiqPAYseizes accounts if they
are suspected of selling Ukash vouchers or other
digital currency, otherwise you shouldn&#39;t have any
problems with transactions under $200. It&#39;s free to
receive and move money around. If you live in a
former Soviet Bloc/CIS country (or can get a card
from there), you can cash it out directly to any Visa.
WebMoney, a Russian digital currency based in
Costa Rica. : &#39;Sadly, this used to be a good anony-
mous currency, but they have turned into the
PayPal of Russia, freezing and seizing accounts
for whatever reasons. However, you can buy
WMZ (WebMoney in USD) prepaid card codes
from buywrnz. corn and other exchangers with a
credit card, and then email them to somebody. That
person converts it to something else and cashes out
anonymously. You don&#39;t even need a WebMoney
account. Exchangezone . com is a good place to
find other people willing to do this at 1:1 cost.
Liberty Reserve, one of the original e-gold
currencies based out ofCosta Rica. You can make
as many LR accounts as you want, and easily
move money around. The only currency more
anonymous than this is Pecunix and Bitcoin. Don&#39;t
like the JavaScript login? Rent a remote desktop
for 5-10 dollars a month or make your own with
a cheap VPS. Your customers don&#39;t even need
Liberty Reserve accounts, they can simply pay
an exchanger to fund your account directly. It&#39;s
up to the exchanger to verify buyers, not Liberty
Reserve. They simply provide a site to move the
money around, not to buy in or cash out directly.

This is probably the most accepted payment
system going, and they allow private transactions
to hide your details when transferring to another
account. No chargebacks allowed, has USD and
Euro accounts. Always move money around before
withdrawing, and use different exchangers to keep
anonymity.
Perfect Money, based in Panama and suppos-
edly Zurich allows third party wires directly
to your account or free account funding via
bank wire. This is also a great currency to fund
your Liberty Reserve account with. Make an
account, fund it (free), then use exchangers like
superchange . ru to convert it into Liberty
Reserve for a low fee. Adds an extra layer of
anonymity.
C-Gold, based in the Seychelles and Malaysia,
has been around since 2001. They have some odd
rules, but otherwise it&#39;s an excellent system if
you don&#39;t mind paying the typical 6-10 percent

exchanger fees. Some exchangers such as
AurumXchange . com allow you to withdraw
directly to an ATMcard.
Pecunix, based in Panama, is entirely based
on gold reserves. You trade in gold units. They
offer excellent anonymous protection if you move
payments to a different account to cash out. No
JavaScript.
Bitcoin is an encrypted, decentralized, truly
anonymous currency. Using the Bitcoin tumbler on
Tor, it is completely impossible to figure out who
paid you money from where. Numerous Bitcoin
exchangers such as Liberty Reserve exist who
will convert it into cash in the mail, or another
e-currency with an ATM card. Tell your customers
to mail cash to a Bitcoin vendor with your Bitcoin
address for direct third party funding. The best part
about Bitcoin is that there are no rules. It is the
future ofmoney. Bank on it to survive any crack-
downs and protect your identity at all costs.
How can your customers use these systems?
Through exchangers who allow in-person cash
bank deposits in most major banks (up to $1000
a day, no ID needed), with mailed cash such as
nanaimo-gold. com, with bank wires, with
credit cards, with Western Union, or by converting
Ukash and Paysafecards they buy at gas stations
and comer stores. The possibilities are nearly
endless. You can even exchange Skype vouchers
into Liberty Reserve now.
What is not anonymous? Well, for starters,
MoneyPak, unless you hire a runner to cash it out.
Chargebacks are also possible - you can phone
them and have them cancel the codes. Same goes
for Ukash, Paysafecards, cashU, and other voucher-
based systems. The key here is to receive it to one
account, convert it to another currency, and then
cash out through somebody else. You have hope-
fully used three or four different countries at this
point and the trail is difficult to follow. You can
do this for under ten percent, which, if you think
is high, think of all the merchant fees charged for
accepting Visa/MC or money lost to chargebacks.
Accepting Western Union as a direct payment is
probably the most foolish way besides Paypal
for selling on the Internet. The secret question!
answer method no longer works in most countries,
and Western Union will report you for constantly
receiving transactions over a certain amount.
Anelik, iKobo, and other wire transfer systems are
equally dangerous and prone to held transactions.
How can you be your own exchanger? Ifyou&#39;re
in the U.S., don&#39;t even bother. The media will
claim you enable child pornographers or al-Qaeda.
The Secret Service will be all over you as Master-
card will dispatch them to shut you down. Some
clown who purchased Liberty Reserve through
you will try to sue you in Florida for enabling his
gambling addiction. Instead, register an IBC in
the Seychelles or Belize to open up bank accounts
to accept customer wires. You can register IBCs

for only $900 through various company forma-
tion sites. Check them on safeorscam. com
or talkgold. com first to make sure they are
legit. Or be an independent anonymous exchanger.
e-cardone. com is the largest wholesaler of
Liberty Reserve, and currently their authorized
site to apply to be an exchanger. Just be careful
with enabling the Liberty Reserve API - it would
be safer to do manual transactions to prevent
getting robbed (which has happened - read the
trainexservice. com blog about it). You
will probably also require DDoS-proof hosting (or
Tor), and a domain that isn&#39;t registered by any U.S.
company to prevent it being yanked. When control-
ling large amounts of digital currency, you should
use something like The Amnesic/Incognito Live
System to log into your own private desktop that
you preferably set up yourself (or VPN), combined
with an encrypted USB drive from the German
Privacy Foundation or IronKey. Make TrueCrvot
containers on those drives and keen your digital

accounts&#39; passwords on them. If really para-
noid, you can use something like Shamir&#39;s Secret
Sharing to split the key up into two drives that both
need to be accessed in order for it to work.
Make sure if withdrawing from your offshore
business account, you aren&#39;t using the debit card
it comes with. Fund a third party card and use that
so they can&#39;t trace back to your bank in Cyprus,
Latvia, wherever if you would not like to report
your income due to various reasons. In Moscow,
it&#39;s downright dangerous to pay your taxes. Once
the organized mob calling itself the Moscow City
Council finds out you have money, they just come
to extort as much more as possible. In some coun-
tries, it&#39;s best if your government doesn&#39;t even
know you exist.
Writers update: Liberty Reserve is now actu-
ally dangerous to use, due to Costa Rican banking
laws recently changing. "HD-Money" and Bitcoin
are now the chosen currencies for best anonymous
payments

[/spoiler:14hbfsdc]

inb4 Teal deer.

the only things I've personally seen bitcoin used for were donations for server costs for a few private trackers.

Re: Bitcoin

Good replies so far. So, I thought that the majority of our ~problems~ ie the Greece going apeshit, Portugal, Ireland etc... were because banks printed too much amount of money to give it to people, business and institution. So when investors were like "hey, I'd like my money back" major shitstorm ensued, or something. But with "marked" money, ie money with an actual id number, banks cannot print any money with nothing to back up this "new" money because it would be considered worthless by the system. It become impossible to print new money backed only by the promise of debt generating wealth. And I have no clue where I'm going with this drunk post. Sorry I know it sounds like a Lulsupher poast. It's hard to express what I mean with my limited english. I remember watching a documentary about the financial system and how it's fucked and one of the proposal was this kind of stuff.

Re: Bitcoin

Originally Posted by Buceph

Originally Posted by James Snowscoran

No, real currency has legitimacy and value because the government of country x has declared that all transactions taking place in said country must accept the national currency as a legitimate form of payment.

Yes, to a degree, but not really. Laws can only mandate that its accepted as tender, it can't create the currencies value. We've been dealing in fiat currency for a long time. It's only value is in perception.

This. Money works because the state guarantees that a piece of paper or coin will be worth goods of exactly the same value. Bitcoin doesn't have any guarantee of the sort and it's not comparable to, for example, the dollar. It's more like gold, which we know of as being a limited resource and as such we assign a value based on rarity regardless of whether you can actually do anything worthwhile with it. Our currency system evolved beyond the point where it was based on the rarity of gold, but nothing says we can't share the common perception that a Bitcoin is worth something. It's fairly obvious it works, but I doubt it will grow much larger than it currently is. This would only work under the assumption that there will really never be any tampering with the source of it and this would need a much, much better legal foundation for it to attract serious users beyond the open source community.

Re: Bitcoin

It would seem that you end up "dying from a thousand paper cuts" due to all those transaction fees.

For the "average" person in a Western country this has little to no practical use.

Edit: And the feeling of a pyramid scheme is hard to shake off.

It's not as useful yet as most conventional currencies, but if it continues to appreciate in value against them, I expect more people will become interested in accepting it as an alternative form of payment.

Re pyramid schemes - the supply of Bitcoin is finite and the rate at which the money supply expands is subject to exponential decay.

On the other hand, people who get in earlier via heavy mining / trading are likely to see substantial gains in real terms as the currency becomes more popular. A bubble is certainly possible if a lot of people suddenly invest, then lose confidence and all try to cash out at once.

Re: Bitcoin

This is a good initiative.
For those too dumb to grasp what is happing here, the whole point of this is to organise trade and exchange wealth without using a centralised financial institution, which as we all know will eventually fuck you over.
The value of the bitcoin is guaranteed by it's scarcity (which in turn is guaranteed by the bitcoin system).

Re: Bitcoin

Originally Posted by rananka

This is a good initiative.
For those too dumb to grasp what is happing here, the whole point of this is to organise trade and exchange wealth without using a centralised financial institution, which as we all know will eventually fuck you over.
The value of the bitcoin is guaranteed by it's scarcity (which in turn is guaranteed by the bitcoin system).

Assuming the Bitcoin system is totally stable and nobody could interefere with it: the scarcity is guaranteed, the value isn't. It's determined by the users (investors) desire to obtain a Bitcoin. There is no central institution that can interfere with the people's evaluation of the currency, but that doesn't mean it's automatically a stable currency. It's actually quite the opposite, because there is no regulation within the system. You can still get massively fucked over by speculation and market crashes, so it really is more like investing in digital gold than anything else. Still, I very much like the idea.

Re: Bitcoin

What's with the 'mining' thing giving you free bitcoins though? It's not a videogame, right? Just have some services to transfer real money into bitcoin money should be enough.

Also it brings into question whether there are people with server farms farming that shit.

The use of farming is limited, since there is a cap on the number of Bitcoins. You can apparently speed up transactions by paying a fee, but you don't have to. The coin generation is mainly a way to keep the amount of currency available stable and to encourage people to offer processing power to the network. I'm not quite sure what happens with dead accounts, I mean accounts whose owners have died without heirs. This should eventually lead to deflation since there is no way for the system to reclaim or destroy those accounts.

Re: Bitcoin

Retardo hippies ITT

Would be nice if this is shut down (if nothing else then for the tears generated), sadly it seems too decentralized. Even so it's just a gimmick for the paranoid, anti-establishment conspiracy theorists out there, so who cares I suppose.

Re: Bitcoin

Originally Posted by Quarantine

Assuming the Bitcoin system is totally stable and nobody could interefere with it: the scarcity is guaranteed, the value isn't. It's determined by the users (investors) desire to obtain a Bitcoin. There is no central institution that can interfere with the people's evaluation of the currency, but that doesn't mean it's automatically a stable currency. It's actually quite the opposite, because there is no regulation within the system. You can still get massively fucked over by speculation and market crashes, so it really is more like investing in digital gold than anything else.

The people's perception of the currency is determined by their fate in the Bitcoin community, in which they can participate. The bitcoin system is open source. So the authority is the user base self, and not a third party government or commercial organisation.
This is a new concept. I'm not an economist so I don't know if this can work on a large market. But one can hope

Re: Bitcoin

What's with the 'mining' thing giving you free bitcoins though? It's not a videogame, right? Just have some services to transfer real money into bitcoin money should be enough.

Also it brings into question whether there are people with server farms farming that shit.

The use of farming is limited, since there is a cap on the number of Bitcoins. You can apparently speed up transactions by paying a fee, but you don't have to. The coin generation is mainly a way to keep the amount of currency available stable and to encourage people to offer processing power to the network. I'm not quite sure what happens with dead accounts, I mean accounts whose owners have died without heirs. This should eventually lead to deflation since there is no way for the system to reclaim or destroy those accounts.

If I read it correctly there will be some decay on your bitcoins meaning if you don't spend them and don't get new ones eventually you will be left at 0.